Romans 12:9-21 "Cross-Shaped Justice" Scott Hoezee

Most of us have no doubt been troubled and saddened by the recent public airing of some rather fiercely anti-Semitic remarks once uttered by Rev. Billy Graham and caught on one of President Nixon's infamous Oval Office tapes. Not only were Rev. Graham's remarks at variance with his public approach to Jewish-Christian dialogue but they were more significantly so very, very un-Christian. To his credit, Rev. Graham has apologized, and I at least have no doubt that the same divine grace he has preached to millions over the years has already proven to be more than a match in forgiving also this sin.

But I mention this today not so much to think about what Rev. Graham once said but more because of the way some people have reacted to this. In particular I have in mind an Op-Ed article in a recent New York Times in which Rev. Graham found a rather unlikely defender in the person of former Nixon legal counsel, Leonard Garment. Mr. Garment claims that the real tragedy of this incident lies less with Rev. Graham's public shame and more with the way this erodes the boundary between private life and public life.

Garment claims that despite the revelation of Rev. Graham's private anti-Semitism, the evangelist's positive public actions toward Jews should be largely unaffected. In a free-speech society, the private realm must be protected. So we should limit our assessment of public people to what they do in public and not pry into what should remain properly private. The problem with this incident is that finding out about Rev. Graham's private words may cause some to regard his public actions as a facade, as fake. But that is a wrong conclusion to draw, Garment claims. A person should be able to say whatever he wants in private even if he acts another way in public. Both realms can be genuine.

Mr. Garment may or may not be making a valid point for the functioning of a free society. However, from a Christian vantage point, his attempt to wall off private words from how people behave in public is wrong-headed. There is a word for ranting against Jewish people in private while embracing them as your friends in public, and the word I have in mind is not "anti-Semitism" but rather "hypocrisy." Christians regard hypocrisy as a grave sin. But if you disconnect private thoughts from public deeds, then you cut the nerve of hypocrisy, you undermine the very possibility for such a thing as hypocrisy to exist.

This morning, although it may not be immediately obvious, the verses we read in Romans 12 are ultimately about avoiding hypocrisy. In verse 9 the apostle Paul kicks things off by asserting, "Love must be sincere." As we will see, the sense of sincerity Paul has in mind is the opposite of hypocrisy. Somehow all of this also ties in with the theme of justice.

Commentators have long been vexed by these thirteen verses because on the surface, this looks like a hodge-podge of advice thrown together willy-nilly with no over-arching theme. In verses 9-16 Paul doesn't even use any verbs. Literally translated it sounds like, "Love, sincere; brotherly love, to each other; in hope, joy; in affliction, patience." It's almost as though Paul is ticking off a laundry list of virtues, piling them up quickly so that he doesn't forget to include them before he runs out of ink in writing this letter.

But more recently commentators have come to view this section as unified with that opening phrase, "Love must be sincere" setting the theme. Last week when we examined justice in the Old Testament, I told you that we needed to avoid thinking of justice along legal lines. Justice in the Bible is more about caring for the innocent than prosecuting the guilty. Today, however, we do swing our thinking around to more "typical" definitions of justice in terms of the guilty getting their comeuppance. Paul has some important things to say about justice in Romans 12, but we must note from the start that since we begin with a call to sincere love, we're going to end with love, too. Even justice is finally about love.

"Love must be sincere." In Greek, the word Paul uses means a love free of hypocrisy. A hypocrite, as a few of you may recall, was literally an actor. In ancient Greek theaters, actors usually wore masks as part of their on-stage costume. And so hypocrisy eventually became associated with play-acting, with having a false front, with hiding your true feelings behind a mask. A hypocrite is someone who pretends to be something he isn't.

It's a deadly sin for Christians partly because new life in Jesus starts on the inside. But if Christ does not live in your innermost thoughts, if the most you can do is fake a Christian attitude toward other people, then something is fundamentally amiss. It makes duplicity your lifestyle. You spend your days keeping people from seeing what's really going on in your heart. But how can you claim to live in the light of Christ if you spend most of your time keeping others in the dark?

So Paul begins by telling us we need agape, we need God-like, Christ-like love at the private center of our existence so that if we then show this love out in public, it will be a natural extension of what is lovely inside us and not a hypocritical cover for something unlovely inside us. In fact, love needs to be in control even when we are confronted with people who are genuinely nasty. What's more, if it is a non-hypocritical, sincere love, then treating scoundrels well is not simply "going along to get along" even though we secretly wish they'd fall flat on their faces and get what they have coming to them.

That's why verses 17-21 are obviously key as we think more now and again later in Adult Fellowship about justice. Because in the course of life, we sooner or later encounter truly difficult people--individuals who wound us, wrong us, betray us, and so make us want to strike back. Justice, we think, demands that they both know what they've done to us and get punished for it in some way, too. We have the right to strike back, we think. We have the right to take some satisfaction in seeing the guilty get their just deserts.

But Paul, taking a cue from the revolutionary ethics of Jesus, says no to all that. Paul says that a sincere love has to set the tone even when our hankering for a greater justice makes us want to respond in kind to evildoers. And if you're tempted to think, "Easy for him to say!" keep in mind that Paul was writing this letter to people living in Rome. For those Christians, talk of persecutors, evil people, and nasty neighbors was not an abstract subject!

Today we hear talk of an evil person and perhaps the image of Osama bin Laden pops into our minds. Back then the average Christian in Rome may have heard this and the image of Horatio, the next-door neighbor, probably popped into mind. Today we hear about those who persecute believers and we perhaps cast our thoughts to far-away China. Back then a Christian in Rome needed to do no more than reach into his pocket, pull out a coin, and take a look at the image of Nero etched there. Persecution was that close. Paul was not writing to folks whose biggest difficulty was the spiritual equivalent of a hangnail. He was addressing believers who knew what it was to confront evil and to suffer for the faith.

Nevertheless, Paul commands that love, and not tit-for-tat justice, be the thing that sets believers apart from the rest of the world. Why? Because that's how we embody the gospel of our God in Christ. The last verse tells us not to overcome evil with evil but to overcome evil with good. That's not simply high-sounding advice, it serves equally well as a summary description of exactly what Jesus did in his ministry and, ultimately, in his death. Jesus met the evil of this world head on but he countered it with love and grace, not balled-up fists and merciless judgment. Living in love and harmony with this world's difficult and evil people is simply part of what it means to be caught up in the rhythms of the gospel.

We don't give back to people measure for measure what they've dished out to us. We don't hit back, we don't define justice as meaning that we ourselves need to make sure the scales of life are balancing out. Why not? Because if we are Christians, then we are ourselves shining examples of God's fundamentally "unjust" way of handling sin and evil. We have received grace. We are the ones who deserved punishment. We are the ones from whom God had every right to exact vengeance for all the shalom-wrecking things we've done. But God let us off the hook. He let Jesus take the heat for us. Grace isn't fair. It isn't just. It doesn't balance the scales of justice so much as it tosses the scales out.

That's who we are as Christian people. That's how we became Christian people. So Paul is saying that it's wrong to get the greatest thing in the universe by grace and then turn right around and take revenge on others. Paul says this most plainly in verse 19, though there is a little verbal time bomb ticking away in that sentence that we mostly miss noticing. Because in verse 19 Paul says, "Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God's wrath." But the word translated in the NIV as "friends" is the Greek word agapetoi.

Paul didn't use the word "brothers," as he does in many other places. He didn't use the more generic Greek word for "friend," as he surely could have. Instead he used a term based on the word agape. Agape is that special, divine love that we get by grace alone. So in verse 19 Paul is throwing in a very loaded word when he says, "Do not take revenge, my dear agape-people!" As phrases go, this one was a poignant knock between the eyes. People who have been graced with God's agape can't turn around and live vengeful lives.

Still, the notion of justice getting accomplished is not dropped, not even in verse 19. We are not to take revenge but Paul does suggest we give room for God's wrath to be exercised. But what does that mean? Mostly it means we stop worrying about such matters and leave it to God. God alone has both the strength and the wisdom to deal with evil the right way. And when I say God has "strength," I don't mean just that he has the muscle required to deliver a mighty death-blow to evil people. I mean also that he has the strength to restrain himself from snap judgments as well as the strength required to absorb much of this world's evil so as to forgive it. The greatest strength Jesus ever showed was not in any miracle he performed but in what he did not do when he willingly died on the cross. Jesus did not leap down from the cross, as the crowds taunted him to do. He did not "call 10,000 angels," as the old song suggests he could have. The greatest strength Jesus ever displayed was in the power required to humble himself, to submit to what was happening to him.

If we want to give place to God's wrath, then part of what that means is giving a place for the cross in our lives. The wrath of God got poured out on Jesus. The wrath of God that should have come to us went to him instead. That doesn't mean God's punishing wrath will never come to anyone else--indeed, the Bible everywhere leaves open the dark possibility of some people being judged and punished by God one day. But the cross tells us that mercy is never far behind even when things like wrath and justice and judgment are being discussed. The sheer fact that we are urged to bless persecutors, feed enemies, and show love to all people (including the decidedly unlovable) should tip us off to something: we are to act in these ways because God in Christ has already set this tone and marked out this path for us to follow. This is God's way! Since God himself sets this example for us, we can be assured that God will not one day turn into a fountain of relentless revenge-taking.

We do not need to worry whether or not God will do the right thing by and by. There is, however, ample reason to scrutinize our own lives to see how sincere our love is. So in closing this morning we can draw out some implications of all this. Once again, some of this is meant more to foster discussion in a little while than to tie off all the loose ends right now.

But we could wonder, for instance, how this relates to the pursuit of justice in society. If we are to love and bless even wrong-doers, then may we never serve on juries, never support the prosecuting of criminals, never press charges ourselves if we are the victims of crime? Clearly Paul didn't think that way because in the very next chapter he goes on to talk about the government's God-ordained task to maintain order and punish criminals.

When a neighbor kidnaps and murders a child, when a man rapes a woman, or when terrorist thugs fly planes into buildings, we both want and expect justice to be pursued in the sense of catching up with these felons so as to ensure they don't do such things again. The state simply must do this. The ticklish matter for us as Christians is to observe all that while at the same time not becoming ourselves consumed with bloodthirsty desires for revenge. Even Christian people are frequently divided on the question of capital punishment, but whether or not you think the state has the right to take this step, you doubtless sense how quickly the idea of putting someone to death slides away from clear-eyed, rational justice into revenge plain and simple.

Paul's words in Romans 12 are not addressed to governments but to Christians within the church. Still, by extension we can see that even whole nations can become consumed with revenge, hitting back because it feels good to do so. And if a state becomes engaged in that kind of vengeance, then ordinary citizens--including Christian citizens--can become caught up in revenge in ways that may work against Romans 12 after all.

Mostly, however, the place where we need to let a sincere love squelch a vengeful spirit is not on the international stage but right here in our own narthex, in our own backyards, in the breakrooms where we work, and in all those ordinary places we go during the course of an average week. I wish we could say that within a church community like this one, temptations to exact a vengeful justice are rare because, after all, we so seldom hurt each other in the first place. But lamentably the hurts we give each other are not that rare. When hurt comes to you, the question always becomes, "Does it end with me now or will this hurt go on and on because I'm going to pursue justice, I'm going to let him have it, I'm going to let her know what this feels like by making her feel the same sting I do."

Bad things happen. That is an unhappy facet to life in this world that seems unlikely to change. The gospel calls us to absorb such evil, to show Christ to the world not just when doing that is relatively easy but to display the grace of Jesus precisely when some in our world would surely agree that we'd have every right to slap back if we wanted. Justice demands it, society says. The gospel demands something else. You cannot walk around as a living example of God's graciously unfair way of doing things only to then behave like someone so fixated on fairness that you can never let even the slightest slight slip. As some have noted, that old adage about "an eye for an eye" sooner or later leaves everyone blind.

In verse 11 Paul suggests that we should never be lacking in zeal. The more we know and understand our God in Christ, the more we sense what is right and wrong in life. The more we are able to spy wrong things around us, the more zealous we might feel to right those wrongs in pursuing some greater justice. But although zeal is good, Paul immediately says also to keep your spiritual fervor by serving the Lord. But when the Lord you serve is the crucified Christ Jesus, then your response to evil won't be vengeful but loving. It's an irony of the Christian life: the closer you are to God, the better you can detect evil. But the closer you are to God in Christ, the less you want to exact justice for that evil and the more you want to embody the gospel by overcoming evil with good. That is how the universe gets saved through Jesus. Adopting the same rhythm in our lives demonstrates that we get it--we get it because we are ourselves agape-people. Amen.